Vatican Cardinal: Contraception ‘is fundamentally an anti-life act’

This article by John-Henry Westen reports on Cardinal Raymond Burke’s recent interview where he discusses how contraception leads to abortion. You can view the video of the interview at the bottom of the article. Reposted from LifeSiteNews.com.

June 12, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In an interview with the US Bishops’ news service, Catholic News Serivce, Cardinal Raymond Burke, the head or “prefect” of the Vatican’s highest court, spoke about the relationship between contraception and the culture of abortion.

“Contraception is the beginning of the anti-life movement,” Cardinal Burke told CNS’ Francis Rocca. “It certainly will favor an abortion culture. It takes the nature of the sexual union and violates it in a very significant way by removing the pro-creative aspect which is inherent to the union of man and a woman, the sexual union, the conjugal union.”

In the video interview, filmed by CNS’ Robert Duncan, Burke added, “By removing that it is fundamentally an anti-life act.”

The cardinal explained:

The contention is that this act still retains all of its goodness because it is a unitive act. It’s not because the act itself has been so disrupted and violated.

They’re sexually united but they’re not giving themselves completely and totally to one another which is the whole meaning of sexual union. Because either one or both are eliminating the natural procreativity of the act.

He added: “The truth of the matter is that many forms of contraception are in fact abortifacient they destroy human life at its very beginning so we may not be talking about a different reality.”

In 1968, at a time when most Christian denominations had already abandoned their historic opposition to contraception, Pope Paul VI shocked those who had expected the Catholic Church to follow suit by issuing the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

In that encyclical the pope reiterated the Church’s teachings against artificial contraception, and predicted that the acceptance of contraception would lead to an increase in infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, a decrease in respect for women, and the imposition of coercive population control policies by governments.